The heightened awareness for International Organizations and their crucial importance for global governance have made them a focus of legitimacy debates. Feeling under pressure to justify their policies IOs have taken up a range of legitimation strategies: Reforms that shall increase efficiency, reforms that shall strengthen accountability/transparency, and reforms to secure a more inclusive representation. Combined these approaches have changed the face of IOs to an unprecedented degree. Nevertheless, IOs are still confronted with a high, probably even rising degree of mistrust and critique. Within academic literature this is mostly explained either as a necessary byproduct of the structure of world politics, as a result of the shortcomings of reforms or as a consequence of the betrayal of selfish elites. In our paper, we want to present a fourth, somehow different explanation for the rampant mistrust. We link mistrust not so much with unfulfilled expectations (as is the case in the above mentioned perspectives) but instead with political apathy, i.e. with the failure of international political processes to comprehensively reveal policy alternatives. Highlighting the contestedness of political decision-making might at the first glance obstruct IOs from working properly. However, having a political process in which actors and positions can be identified helps to position one selves towards the political order and, thereby, overcomes political apathy. Having said this, we point to a fourth option of top-down reform: to uncover the political character of IOs’ decision-making process. In our paper we do not only want to discuss these four reform strategies but also illustrate their theoretical origins: While the first three strategies are embedded in a liberal tradition, in which the main aim of a political order is to secure the fulfillment of individual interests, the fourth strategy is linked to a republican understanding, which highlights experience and contingency as intrinsic features of all politics. While republican approaches are often conceived as too demanding, we want to show that even in the realm of international politics and top-down reforms one can learn from a republican perspective.
